Friday, July 1, 2011

Mariano Grinbank has posted a really great article about the remarks of Dr.Walter Sinnott regarding the morality of Rape. He offers insightful thoughts on the reasons why Dr Sinnott thinks that rape is wrong.

What makes rape immoral is that rape harms the victim in terrible ways. The victim feels pain, loses freedom, feels subordinated, and so on. These harms are not justified by any benefits to anyone.

My thing is that rape is objectively wrong because it's wrong. I've read that many men rationalize rape by thinking that their sexual prowess is so great that although a woman is initially resistant and in fact says "no", he can change her mind. Such men don't think they are causing women to suffer. In their twisted imaginations they think they are doing a woman a favor. How do you convince such a person that what they are doing is wrong?

Biblically, in ancient Israel, that is why rapists were executed. I don't think that executing rapists is what we need to do now, but I think just assuming that people know that its wrong to cause pain and suffering for others isn't going to work.

2 comments:

Sam Harris argues that rape played a beneficial role in human evolution.Richard Dawkins argues that rape is only arbitrarily immoral now.Dan Barker argues that even now rape is not absolutely immoral.And on it goes.